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Western Digital gets sued for sneaking SMR disks into its NAS channel
All three of the surviving conventional hard drive vendors—Toshiba, Western Digital, and Seagate—have gotten caught sneaking disks featuring Shingled Magnetic Recording technology into unexpected places recently. But Western Digital has been the most brazen of the three, and it's been singled out for a class action lawsuit in response.
Although all three major manufacturers quietly added SMR disks to their desktop hard drive line-up, Western Digital is the only one so far to slip them into its NAS (Network Attached Storage) stack. NAS drives are expected to perform well in RAID and other multiple disk arrays, whether ZFS pools or consumer devices like Synology or Netgear NAS appliances.
In sharp contrast to Western Digital's position on SMR disks as NAS, Seagate executive Greg Belloni told us that there weren't any SMR disks in the Ironwolf (competitor to Western Digital Red) line-up now and that the technology is not appropriate for that purpose.
[...] Hattis Law has initiated a class action lawsuit against Western Digital, accordingly. The lawsuit alleges both that the SMR technology in the newer Western Digital Red drives is inappropriate for the marketed purpose of the drives and that Western Digital deliberately "deceived and harm[ed] consumers" in the course of doing so.
Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Seagate Caught Using SMR in Barracuda Compute and Desktop Drives
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:16PM (8 children)
I had to do a bit of digging to first understand what SMR is, then I still don't know if I really understand what the nefarious problem is. Is it that they are illegally misleading consumers?
(Score: 2, Informative) by RandomFactor on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:43PM (1 child)
Mostly write performance based from what I can figure.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @01:44AM
The drives basically wear out like flash instead of traditional magnetic media. You only get so many writes to them before the sectors are toasted, and since that affects a whole chain of sectors, not just the one....
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Saturday May 30 2020, @03:23PM (5 children)
People are buying "NAS" drives and putting them in large complex storage pools. What they really want for that application are enterprise grade drives. These particular drives have slow write speeds in certain situations (like a ZFS pool) and become slow, the controller thinks the drive has stopped responding and removes it from the pool. If the controller removes several drives it could be disastrous.
These NAS drives are labeled correctly. A box with a few mirrored drives. No one is buying drives as small as 4TB for big data.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @04:22PM (3 children)
No, enterprise grade drives are not required for this application. What is desired is ordinary consumer grade dtives, which these are not. SMR drives have the read performance of regular drives, but write properties that are closer to tape. The only thing they're really good for is bulk data storage, such as backups or media libraries.
Drives that fail when subjected to ordinary real world use are not fit for purpose. While SMR drives might be suitable for some applications, they're definitely not suitable for all, or even most applications, and these companies have simply decided to sell substandard, limited - application drives as general purpose without disclosing what they are. It's at best a deceptive marketing practice, but what's really needed is a recall, like when Intel's pentium FPU didn't work.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Sunday May 31 2020, @12:50AM
The drives aren't failing. The controller thinks they failed because the speeds were too slow.
(Score: 1) by leon_the_cat on Sunday May 31 2020, @09:13AM
They have nearly the same speed for sequential write. Its many random writes that can cause them to slow to a crawl
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday May 31 2020, @11:04PM
In agreement with the other responses, and I pretty much hate the whole SMR concept in that the controller has to go back and re-write tracks, hence the big delays.
That said, it's conceivable that a RAID controller could be designed to take SMR write delay issues into account and compensate, or at least tolerate it.
But that said, SMR drive performance is gonna suck. They were originally conceived for storing long-term somewhat slow data, like any kind of telemetry / datalogging, security camera recording (but not many cameras on 1 drive), storage of backups, etc. You might tolerate one in a PC / laptop if it's an auxiliary drive, not your main boot / OS work drive.
(Score: 3, Informative) by nyebi on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:33AM
The real problem is that manufacturers in the past clearly marketed the cheaper SMR drives as archive storage because of the associated performance issues. But now they silently slipped that technology into a product line that people mostly buy for applications that will massively suffer from said performance degradation.
And it's not just they no longer prominently featured in the data sheets that a drive is SMR, they went as far as not answering direct customer questions about the topic, stating that the technology they use in their products is not the customer's business.